February 2021 Income Report

February was a weird month. We had a lot of outgoings, but we also made a load of paper profits on cryptocurrency – woo!

Although our costs were hefty, crypto madness pushed us into profit. It was a welcome return to the black, after we’d taken our first loss in a long while in January.

Summary of result for the month

Here’s the headlines

Cryptocurrency (+£400.87)

Here’s how our overall crypto position looks since we first started (we didn’t add any more cash after putting in the initial £700ish):

You love to see it. What a journey we’ve been on! Over the last few months bitcoin has been heading up and up and up – thanks in part to Tesla for buying lots of it, which seems to make it feel a bit more mainstream.

Personally, I do have big concerns over Bitcoin and whether it really is all it is cracked up to be (I still stand by my post criticizing it) but i’m not going to complain about gains.

As Ben said to me: you don’t have to like it to make money from it.

Our other foray into crypto has been through mine-on-your-phone apps: Pi and Bee. We don’t count any ‘crypto’ we’ve earned on these as the likelihood is they won’t ever be worth anything. However, on the chance that they do materialise into something valuable, we keep on grinding away – it would be a huge shame to miss out.

Surveys (+£48.22)

Not much more to say here, it’s the usual dependable income earned mainly through our favorite, Prolific . We’re also completing YouGov surveys too, working towards the chunky £50 payout.

Matched Betting (+£7.50)

After a January which was surprisingly barren on the matched betting front, we were back on it in February. It’s the usual concoction of weekly bet club offers that brought in most of the money, so it’s mostly slow-and-steady stuff. We made £157.50 of profits in the month.

Offsetting those gains was the Oddsmonkey annual subscription which came in at an eye-watering £150 (and we understand it’s going up next year too). This is starting to look a little pricey – and even pricier if you pay monthly rather than annually like we do.

We seriously considered whether we should bother renewing this, but we decided it was still just about worth it. Lots of our matched betting is done without this tool, but it’s still useful for finding offers and sometimes tracking down best odds on accas and free bets. The fact we’ve paid off the entire year charge in just a month suggest that’s it’s not an enormous drag on our profits.

We still stand by what we wrote in our original article on whether Oddsmonkey is worth it: it is, especially if you’re new to matched betting.

Shares (£3.47)

What more can be said about such a narrow gain? Things largely remained static in the month. We continue to top up our positions.

Closing our business (-£173.54)

As you’ll have probably followed, we closed our business a few months ago. It wasn’t really viable for the levels of effort we could dedicate to it. It’s something we lamented in its own post: why we closed our business.

Closing the business has taken us months to wrap-up. In hindsight we made a huge mistake setting it up as a company. That meant that we had to prepare and file accounts. It cost us £240 just to do that (and that’s even with us having neatly prepared all the information ready for the accountant to just compile it into the right format). It’s not a fortune, but on a small loss-making business it’s a fairly unnecessary expense.

Lessons have been learned – we’d do things differently next time. On the positive side, however, we really didn’t lose that much money overall on the venture, so it could have been worse.

Total value of the fund

So, let’s see where all that brings us to at the end of February:

The progress-over-time chart looks like this. It’s nice to be moving upwards again after last month’s dip. Depending on the way stock and crypto prices move, we should hopefully be hitting £10k this year.

And here’s where all of our money is held / invested right now:

The composition of our portfolio is rapidly changing. Last month 43.6% of our holdings were in our bank account. Now that’s down to 36.1% as we’ve moved more money into stock and shares, and crypto has grown as a large part of the overall mix.

We’ve got increased amounts in our matched betting accounts (which means they’re in our accounts at the bookmakers) so at some stage we’ll need to do a sweep and withdraw it to our bank. There’s no hurry there.

Aims for March

Our goals for 2021 continue to be:

• Try to generate an average of £300 per month
• Pursue new investment ideas so we can put our cash to some use.

Had it not been for two massive expenses in Feb (the Oddsmonkey subscription and our accounting expenses for closing our business), we’d have hit that.

For March, with these expenses now out of the way, we’ll go full steam ahead to try to meet our targets!